A Florida woman who says she fired a warning shot at her abusive husband was released from a Jacksonville jail on Tuesday under a plea deal that capped her sentence to the three years she had already served.

Marissa Alexander, 34, was initially sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2012 but her conviction was later overturned. She faced another trial on charges that could have put her behind bars for 60 years before she agreed to a plea deal in November.

The shale oil boom of the last five years has brought soaring housing prices to Williston, North Dakota, where a 700-square-foot apartment costs an average of $2,394 a month. Rootless, job-seeking newcomers have occasionally resorted to sleeping in their vehicles, unable to afford the highest rent in the nation.

“We’ve seen people living in their motor vehicles through the last five years, because of housing prices being expensive,” said Williston Police Department’s public information officer, Detective David Peterson.

State and county officials cannot show how billions of dollars collected through a voter-approved tax on millionaires are being spent or whether the related programs have helped people with mental illness as voters intended, a state watchdog commission reported Tuesday.

The Little Hoover Commission report is the latest review to find that the state has little evidence to show that $13 billion in Proposition 63 funds have been effectively spent.

A jury convicted two ex-Vanderbilt football players on Tuesday of raping a former student, rejecting claims that they were too drunk to know what they were doing and that a college culture of binge drinking and promiscuous sex should be blamed for the attack.

The jury deliberated for three hours before announcing that Brandon Vandenburg and Cory Batey were guilty of aggravated rape and aggravated sexual battery.

The United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has been quietly collecting data on millions of Americans since 2008 using license plate readers as part of the widening of a program originally aimed at locating drug traffickers, according to documents received by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The records show that the program, called the National License Plate Recognition Initiative, is capable of tracking the movements of everyday Americans all over the country, a press release by the ACLU said Monday. The documents, which also revealed a proliferation of license plate readers in the United States, did not reveal the budget for the program.

On Thursday, 17-year-old Kristiana Coignard was shot dead by three police officers in the lobby of the Longview Police Department. Coignard arrived at the station around 6:30 p.m. and asked to talk to an officer. Police say the girl was “brandishing a weapon” before she was shot four times.

The three officers, who have not been identified, have been placed on leave. The investigation of Coignard’s death is now being handled by the Texas Rangers.

After an apparent protest against the broadcasting company Fox, a man shot himself in the chest in front of the News Corp building in New York on Monday morning and later died. The man was a former employee of a local Fox affiliate in Texas, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, and had been claiming the company “ruined his life”.

A gun and a suicide note were found at the scene, a New York police department spokesman told the Guardian. Nobody else was injured.